Chapter 2 preamble

During the twelve months 1990-1991, the poet James Fenton published a weekly column in the Sunday Independent entitled "The Art of Poetry", borrowing the words of the Roman poet Horace The title of his famous essay on poetry.Fenton selects a short poem or excerpt each week, and writes a review, explaining both a line and an aspect of poetic art in general.As early as 1991, Mr. Blake Morrison, the literary editor of the newspaper, called and asked me if I would like to start a similar column after James Fenton, writing some reviews on fiction. I always give serious consideration to proposals from the press, but often turn them down.But this time, before Blake had finished speaking, I almost decided to say yes.During the nearly thirty years from 1960 to 1987, I both wrote novels and taught English literature at the University of Birmingham.I have published several essays, mainly discussing various aspects of novels and some problems of novel writing itself.Over the years, I have also taught a course called "The Form of the Fiction." In 1987, I retired early from college and found that I had no desire to continue writing purely academic review articles. Interested, but feel that I still have a lot to say about the art and history of the novel, which the general reader may be interested to hear.Thus, I realized that a weekly column in a newspaper would provide an ideal speaking venue.

I quickly drew up a plan, which was title-centered rather than text-centered, because novels, unlike poetry, cannot be published in full in newspapers and periodicals.Every week I select one or two excerpts from ancient and modern novels or short stories to illustrate a certain aspect of the "art of fiction". (I named my column "The Art of Fiction" after Fenton's title "The Art of Poetry", and such a series of articles can only use such a title. So even if it uses the title of Henry James' book I was disturbed to have offended this famous man, and I still reserved the title for this book.) In addition to Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, my weekly selection Fragments are always by different writers.I confine myself to Anglo-American writers because, as pedants say, this is "my field."I am less confident when asked to analyze non-British and American writers with careful precision.Some of the excerpts in this book have been discussed in my previous work, but in different terms.

I start with "beginning" and always want to end the whole text with "end".In the middle of the two, sometimes the title of the next week's article is inspired by the previous week's article, and I added it immediately; when I first made the plan, I never asked for a systematic and step-by-step discussion of the theoretical issues of the novel.In the process of revising these scattered articles into a book, I inserted some cross-reference entries and provided an index, which somewhat compensated for the scattered articles.Once a teacher, always a teacher.Although this book is written for a "general audience", I have intentionally used some technical terms (with explanations) that may be unfamiliar to the general reader, but without these appropriate descriptive words, you cannot analyze the work, just as a technician The machine cannot be disassembled without the proper tools.Some of these terms are modern, such as "intertextuality", "metafiction", etc.; Linguists have not revised these terms.The book could have taken another title, Rhetoric of Fiction, if Wayne Booth hadn't already used it.I have always thought of fiction as a rhetorical art—that is, as we read, the novelist "persuades" us to agree with him; drunk.Van Gogh has a wonderful depiction of this in his painting "The Novel Reader".Of course, the novelist sometimes has to deliberately break his own formation in order to achieve certain artistic purposes, but his method is still to first set up a ecstasy formation.

Each article in the book was originally written with a word limit, but I always wrote it a little longer, leaving it to the discretion of two masters, Blake Morrison and his assistant Jane Daly. (I would like to record my admiration for them here. The tailoring work of both of them is just right and impeccable.) In the process of revising the book, I restored all the parts that were forced to be deleted. , and added some new material to almost every article, both examples and discussions in the newly added material.One article was deleted in its entirety and replaced by a new article discussing the "chapter" issue.To account for every detail of fiction-making, I have often referred to my own experience as a writer, which would have been neither appropriate nor practical when I first wrote for a newspaper.

This book is about 30% longer than the original newspaper serial.It is not my intention, however, to "include" all aspects of each subheading, since most of them could, after all, warrant a lengthy treatise or even a book; book or paper.This book is prepared for those who have a little taste of literature and criticism. It is a book for people to read and browse.This book does not make authoritative assertions on any aspect of any subject, but I hope it will enhance the reader's understanding and appreciation of fiction, suggesting some new ways of reading—and perhaps writing—because Literature is the most colorful and most beneficial form.